Hi, my name is Don!

June 23, 2010

Impecable timing

My car couldn’t have broken down at a worse time. I’m not sure why it decided to break down tonight but a lot happened tonight and it would have been nice if I had the car. Since I didn’t have to car, I had to walk to work… at 11:00 at night.

My brother gave me a ride home because it was already getting late and walking home would have taken a good hour. He was heading in my direction anyway so it was convenient. I was just about to settle in when my cell phone rang. It was one of the supervisors from work. One of this worker forget their password and wasn’t able to get into Windows. After asking a few questions, something caught me off guard.

The user had a desktop machine and it was asking for a BIOS password. The strange thing was that we don’t password protect the BIOS on desktop machine. We have a password set for the BIOS of laptops but not for desktops. After hearing that, I wasn’t sure what was going on.

At first, I thought it was the encryption for the hard drive but the name of the user didn’t ring a bell. I asked the supervisor a few more questions to confirm that it was a desktop that he was talking about.

The user had called the help desk to get the password reset but if it’s the BIOS password of a desktop, there was nothing the help desk could have done. Heck, there’s nothing I could have done because we don’t have any records of desktop BIOS passwords. However this password was set, the only person who knew it was the person who set it.

Windows wouldn’t boot up on this machine without that password and the worker that was on duty didn’t know what it was. He told me that they set the password on there so that no one would use the computer other than the people in his area. But he also told me that he gave the password out to a few people so one of those people must have changed the password on him earlier in the day.

They needed to ship out some stuff so they needed to get into Windows as soon as possible. They called my worker but there was no answer on his phone. I didn’t think they would be because he’s probably fast asleep since he gets into the office quite early in the morning. One of the other supervisor recommended that they call me.

I was going to try to assist from home but as soon as it was confirmed that it was a desktop machine that I was dealing with, there wasn’t anything that I could do from home. Since I didn’t have my car with me, I had to walk to work to fix the problem.

When I arrived at work, I tried to clear the BIOS password by taking out the battery but I guess that trick doesn’t work anymore because the prompt for the password was still there. I had no choice but to find another desktop machine and swap out the hard drive. That was the quickest and easiest thing to do and whatever else needed to be done, I could deal with in the morning.

I quickly changed the hard drive and got the user up and running. I wasn’t sure or not to set the password on this motherboard to prevent any further tampering in the morning. We decided not to set a password and left it at that.

My coworker was had just finished his shift stuck around for a bit to give me a ride home. After all this running around, I’m exhausted.